Constructive Faith

Exodus 14:19-31

Back when they still taught things like history and literature in public schools, before “no child left behind” left most children behind and white supremacists gutted public education, preferring indoctrination, I learned a little bit about English history, the Magna Carta, the War of the Roses, and their Civil War in high school World History class, though world history really only meant white history back then.

But most of what I learned about English history I learned from Shakespeare, whoever that might have been, for I am among the many who believe the guy from Stratford-upon-Avon probably didn’t write the plays.

The history plays feature memorable figures, like the evil hunchback Richard the Third and the party-boy Prince Hal who becomes the courageous Henry the Fifth over the course of three plays. The former, Richard, has been portrayed on screen by Ian McKellen and Benedict Cumberbatch, while the latter, Henry, by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, three British knights of a different kind, and one in the making.

It turns out, while Shakespeare’s history plays are great theatre, they are less than great as history. In fact, they are thinly-veiled Tudor propaganda, for the playwright’s career started during the reign of the final Tudor monarch, Elizabeth the First. Richard was not as grotesque as portrayed, the Tudor kings not nearly as righteous and wise. 

But remarkably, Shakespeare’s “Henry the Fifth” gets it right about the Battle of Agincourt.

Most of us only know of the battle, if we know of it at all, from the Shakespeare play. Americans don’t spend a lot of time on the Hundred Years War, though this particular battle is well known to military historians. 

The English had invaded France to press Henry’s claim to territory and titles in places like Brittany, Normandy, and Flanders. This was the age of chivalry, which is to say an age when a powerful few exploited the poor many, and threw lives into the buzzsaw of war for profit and for vanity. Not that that ever happens anymore…

Henry’s troops arrived in France in mid-August, already late in the season, and immediately besieged a town called Harfleur. The siege took longer than expected, and diseases like dysentery were running rampant among the English troops. 

Henry had hoped to provoke the French crown prince, the Dauphin Louis, into a decisive battle. When that didn’t happen, the English moved back toward the coast, fearing the onset of winter and the sizable French mobilization. The two armies finally clashed at Agincourt.

The English had around 8500 fighting men, the French three times as many. It should have been a slaughter, in which case we would not know Henry’s speech on the eve of battle, rallying his “band of brothers” as imagined by Shakespeare.

When the battle had ended, around 6000 French soldiers were dead, including three dukes, nine counts, and even an archbishop. The French had attacked the English baggage train, generally understood as bad form, and the English had executed French prisoners, also considered bad form, and possibly caused because the English had captured more prisoners than they could control.

Quite apart from the fact that the English were superior humans, and Henry the finest of them all, at least according to the propaganda, how did the English win?

Continue reading “17 September 2023: Agincourt”

Matthew 18:15-20

A little over a week ago, the highly-anticipated video game Starfield was released. Its success is critical to both the studio that produced it and to Microsoft’s XBox platform, which needs a new high profile game. There were articles and reviews in the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, though I suspect many of you skipped over them. I did not. You see, I am a gamer, spelled both g-a-m-e-r and g-a-y-m-e-r. 

The first personal computer I used was a friend’s Commodore 64 in the barracks while serving in the Army. The first personal computer in my home was an Apple IIc. I’ve been playing video games ever since. 

The early games were on big floppy discs, the kind that were actually floppy. School kids in those days were cyber-trekking on the Oregon Trail, though we weren’t using the term cyber yet, while I was exploring the universe in Hitchhiker’s Guide, based on the Douglas Adams novels, or engaging in more earthy explorations as Leisure Suit Larry. 

You don’t want to go there. Trust me.

Computer games back then were all text-based, nothing more than choose-your-own-adventure decision trees, though there might be some primitive graphics in blocky green and black. These days, my watch has more processing power than those early personal computers, and the top-tier games, on computer or console, are a whole new world, quite literally, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or a galaxy of space colonies. The games are immersive and interactive entertainment with scripts and actors. 

Folks who are not gamers often imagine that all games are first-person shooters like Call of Duty, or simulation games like Sim City, but role-playing games like Starfield are plot-driven, more like movies where you change the outcome. Some games are narratives without any violence at all, and some are immersive environments with no discernible plot.

And while snowflakes in Florida are terrified that reading a book is going to make their kid gay, one of the first important characters their kids are meeting in Starfield is a gay widower. 

Today’s best role-playing games are morally complex, asking you to make tough decisions. Even in a game like Red Dead Redemption, where your character is part of a gang of outlaws, you have opportunities to do the right thing, to show compassion, and to reap the karma of your decisions.

Sometimes in role-playing games, as in real life, you are faced with a version of the Trolley Problem, a classic exercise in ethics. It comes in a number of variations, but the most common elements are this: You see a trolley coming down the track. If it continues on the current track, it will kill five people who are stuck on that track. Maybe they are tied up by some Dastardly Dan, or are stuck in a vehicle that has broken down, or are simply construction workers jackhammering away with ear plugs in and backs turned to the oncoming trolley.

But you happen to be standing next to the switch that can send the trolley to a side track, where only one person is on the track.

If you do nothing, five people die. If you take action, you will have made the decision that killed one.

There are no other choices in the exercise. This is not the Kobayashi Maru, and you are not Cadet James T. Kirk.

Continue reading “10 September 2023: Trolley Problem”

Romans 12:9-18

The world is weird, pretty much every day. One recent example… Last Sunday, after our discussion of the 8th Phoenix Affirmation, a guest asked me about a line from Paul’s letter to the Romans, one you’ve all heard: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 

And of course, that passage would turn out to be in this week’s scheduled lectionary reading, one I selected months ago. You didn’t hear it today because I cut those last verses of the reading. So let’s talk about why, why Paul falls into the category of a necessary problem, why assumptions he made, and to some extent Jesus also made, have skewed Christianity, and where Paul gets it right and is worthy of study.

We can reasonably claim that Christianity would not exist as a world religion without Paul. What we think of as ancient Judaism, the religion of John the Baptizer and of Jesus, really begins to take a shape we recognize after the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th Century Before the Common Era, six centuries removed from Moses and four centuries after David and Solomon. Some even place the formation of a familiar Judaism as late as the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century BCE, not much further removed from the time of Jesus than we are from the formation of this church. 

The Judaism of the 1st century of the Common Era was diverse, with many competing movements, some led by charismatic leaders like John with his ministry of baptism, and Jesus with his ministry of healing and teaching. 

The Sadducees and Pharisees are mostly accepted as the major players in the Jewish Council that served as a civilian administration under Roman control, and were closely connected with the Temple authorities. But there were also Essenes and Sicarii, social banditry and just plain old banditry. 

It was chaos, and pretty much every sect was mad at every other sect, because it was easier to be mad at one another than to be mad at the Romans, who were the real problem but also very dangerous, kind of like the way America’s minorities and impoverished stay mad at one another rather than at the corporations and billionaires who are destroying our democracy and our planet.

The followers of Jesus were one weird little sect among many weird little sects, because much of the Roman world found the Judaism of that age weird, the idea of one God, the dietary restrictions, and especially circumcision.

Paul tell us he was a Pharisee. We have no reason to doubt this. And not just a Pharisee, but a bit of an extremist. He is the one holding the cloaks as the crowd stones Stephen. But then he has this episode on the road to Damascus, when post-Ascension Jesus appears to him, and he converts.

Skeptical? Me too. 

There is no way to test claims of direct revelation, claims that often turn out to be mutually exclusive, filled with contradiction, the claims of a Paul or a Joseph Smith or any number of other self-proclaimed seers and prophets, each offering the one true and final word from God. 

But on the other side of his vision or psychotic break, whichever you think it is, Paul ends up being the bridge between the insular world of Judean Judaism, the broader world of Diaspora Judaism, the many Jews who already lived in places like Babylon and Alexandria, and the Roman and Hellenistic non-Jewish world. For despite being deeply involved in religious sectarianism, Paul is also a merchant, at the very least bilingual, speaking Aramaic and Greek, and a citizen of Rome. We can assume that he is well traveled.

Paul knows people who knew Jesus, at the very least Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, but Paul never heard Jesus teach and was not part of the inner circle. He had no contact with Jesus or his followers before the crucifixion, as far as we know. Yet, Paul is the earliest authentic source we have. None of the gospels and none of the letters were written by actual disciples. Paul’s letter to the church at Thessaloniki, written around 52 CE, is the earliest surviving Christian text. 

The seven authentic letters of Paul contain some beautiful stuff, but they lack some of the gritty populism of the gospels, which is sort of amazing, because Paul was already the most influential figure in the movement before the gospels were written. 

So influential is Paul that we cannot surgically remove him despite the fervent desire of so many. We can guess about Jesus in his historic context, but we cannot be sure Paul hasn’t influenced our view.

Continue reading “Paul Right and Wrong: September 2, 2023”

Exodus 1:8-2:10

I came out of the closet during the worst years of the AIDS crisis. Folks were dying, including people I knew, co-workers and members of my social circle. Some courageously went out in public with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic form of cancer, visible on their bodies like a latter day Scarlet Letter, while others hid from public view. People died alone, or without the comfort of longtime companions, as families and hospitals refused to acknowledge same-sex relationships. 

It is no surprise, then, that the late playwright Larry Kramer led others in founding ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Socially-acceptable hemophiliacs like Ryan White aside, AIDS was most common among gay men, and gay men did not fit social constructs of gender expression and affectional orientation. Many believed the disease was divine judgment.

ACT UP followed in a long tradition of direct and disruptive action in pursuit of justice, an approach used by Suffragettes and activists in the Civil Rights movement, and still used by Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and the particularly controversial and diverse Stop Oils collectives.

Legal equality for the LGBTQI+ community is at-risk these days, but at least for now, legal equality is the law of the land, even in neo-fascist Florida, the state of hate, even in liberal California, where small business owner Lauri Carleton was gunned down just nine days ago for displaying a Pride flag. 

There is still no cure for HIV/AIDS, though retroviral drugs have slowed disease progression and extended lives. Among those are treatments developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, a company named after a play that is itself named after a passage in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, when the cranky man of God asks if there is no balm in Gilead. The balm in Gilead was a rare perfume used for medicinal purposes and derived from the terebinth tree. The prophet essentially asks “Is there no medicine for this?”

Gilead’s HIV treatments, the medicine for this, use a drug they developed called tenofovir. Like all of the antiretroviral therapies developed to manage HIV/AIDS, tenofovir came with awful side effects, was extremely expensive, and incredibly profitable for the company.

According to New York Times reporting on a current lawsuit, as early as 2004, Gilead had created a version of tenofovir that was safer for patients. They shelved that new treatment for over a decade. The existing version of tenofovir was under patent until 2017. Gilead continued to sell the more dangerous form of the drug for another decade, only rolling out the new version in 2015, allowing them to extend the life of the patent. An extended patent meant no competition, and a continued monopoly meant more profit.

Gilead Sciences knew the newer form of tenofovir was less toxic to patients, doing less damage to kidney’s and bones. They didn’t care. Corporations, originally intended as a structure to allow people to partner in business creation, now function as a facility for amoral and often immoral conduct.

Continue reading “27 August 2023: No Balm From Gilead”

Matthew 14:22-33

When I arrived at that particular congregation, I was told it was part of my job to select the hymns for worship. This was not welcome news for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that I am not even slightly musical, as well as the fact that the congregation, like the Park Church, used the New Century Hymnal, which was a great idea in the abstract all those years ago, but there are far better hymnals out there today. 

But the real real problem of me picking the hymns was best captured by an exchange when I’d been there about a month. I don’t know whether the sermon was any good that Sunday, probably not. It certainly wasn’t on the mind of the congregant who made a beeline for me after worship. “Pastor,” he asked, “Why don’t you choose hymns we know?”

The answer, which I gave, was obvious. “I just got here. I don’t know what hymns you know.” 

For the record, that was not the right answer. 

Pretty much everyone in those pews, and pretty much everyone in these pews, has hymns they know and love. Which would be great if you all knew and loved the same hymns, if every hymn spoke to every one of our guests who comes through the door, if every hymn was suitable to every season and occasion and reflected our theology as progressive Christians engaged in the world. But you do not all know and love the same hymns, and as our church becomes more diverse, the variety of musical expression and taste only grows.

So yeah, hymnals can be an issue. 

Continue reading “Flip the Script: 13 August 2023”

Genesis 32:22-31
Matthew 14:13-21

On a muggy July evening eight years ago, nursing student Stephen Smith was found murdered on a rural road in South Carolina. Smith, who was openly gay, was romantically linked to the older son of a prominent local attorney. The case would go cold quickly and be neglected for six years.

Less than three years later, that same attorney’s longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, died as the result of severe head trauma. It was reported that she had fallen from the front steps of the wealthy family’s estate, Moselle. There was no autopsy and the death certificate would fraudulently list “natural causes.” An insurance settlement of $4.3 million dollars never reached the family, instead being stolen by the attorney.

One year later, in 2019, the younger son of the attorney was drunk driving a motorboat late at night when it crashed, killing one of his close friends, Mallory Beach. His blood alcohol level was .286, more than three times the legal limit. The family attempted to blame another young man for the crash, and it was weeks before the younger son was arrested. Even then, he received special treatment.

Facing civil suits related to the boat accident and a forensic review of his financial records, attorney Alex Murdaugh murdered his wife and younger son at the kennel of the family’s 1700+ acre hunting estate on the evening of June 7, 2021, shooting his son with a shotgun, and his wife with an assault weapon.

Years of fraud and embezzlement began to unspool. Alex Murdaugh, conspiring with his surviving son, Buster, attempted to sell and hide assets. In early September of that year, Alex was supposedly shot in the head while changing a tire on a rural road. A cousin was later arrested for conspiracy to assist a suicide, though it is not clear that Alex Murdaugh’s death was actually intended. The cousin was also Alex Murdaugh’s partner in narco-trafficking, providing him with Oxycodone for personal use and distribution.

You know much of this story, for it was in the news for months, especially during the trial earlier this year which resulted in Alex Murdaugh being convicted for murdering his wife Maggie and son Paul. 

Some of the financial crimes have been adjudicated, while others remain in various stages of litigation and prosecution. Investigations into the deaths of Stephen Smith and Gloria Satterfield have been re-opened, and there are allegations of other crimes. Netflix, CourtTV, and podcasts aplenty have been all over this, of course, because humans love a good scandal. Always have. 

I can just imagine the people of Jerusalem gossiping as King David’s family was torn apart by rape, murder, and rebellion. Then again, King David was a murderer too.

We could just wrap Alex Murdaugh’s behavior up in a box called drug addiction, and put a label on it, and drug addiction is a terrible thing. But the American scourge named Sackler shares something fundamental with Alex Murdaugh, and with citizen Trump as described in his niece Mary’s book “Too Much and Never Enough.” 

Continue reading “The Lowcountry Murders: 6 August 2023”

Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

By the time I arrived in Mr. Taylor’s classroom, the super cool one at the very end of the hall with the funky walls, the room for the supposedly smart kids, I’d passed through a tough couple of years, including a hospitalization, the death of a beloved grandmother, and abuse. We’d moved out of the city, and I was no longer the gifted child left feral in the elementary school library, but was instead just an average kid in above average classes. Of course, my seventh grade teacher knew almost none of this. He just told it like he saw it, and informed me that I was a pessimist.

I am pretty sure he was well intentioned, though I doubt telling a confused 12 year-old trauma victim they are a pessimist is in the Teacher’s Handbook. All these years later, I still think back to that conversation. He could not have been more wrong, something he might have discovered had he known what to ask or had I known what to say. I wasn’t a pessimist. I was a survivor. Socially awkward, to be sure, guarded with good reason, but tough as nails. 

Today, I mock and denounce the wingnuts who believe there is a child-trafficking ring operating out of a pizza parlor to harvest fear hormones from children, am frustrated by those who fall for Q-Cult disinformation like the recent shockumentary “Sound of Freedom.” 

I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerous man who believes crazy stuff and is an embarrassment to the family name, and that’s saying something considering Teddy and that bridge back in ’69. 

But to be honest, crazy could also be used to describe my belief system, in a creation that is ultimately good, in the power of love and the potential for human thriving. Most days this whole human project looks like a slow-motion disaster, the politest term I could use. And a disaster not just for us, but for life on the planet, the only planet we currently know of where life exists. 

And yet, I hope, and I fight, even on the dark days, and most of us have experienced dark days at times.

Today’s scripture texts, from Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome and from the gospel attributed to but surely not written by the disciple Matthew, risk getting into the theological weeds, predestination and justification and other silliness we’ve covered in recent weeks, though at least the selection from Paul ends with that powerful and reassuring passage that says nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

But there is this foundational message about the kingdom of God, and that is where I would like to focus.

Continue reading “30 July 2023”

Romans 8:12-25

The opening weekend for the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” was arguably a disaster. It cost around $16 million to make, and brought in a fraction over $200 thousand in the U.S. and Canada. Of course, ticket prices were a lot lower then, but so was the cost of making the film. It would go on to be a modest success during its cinema run, taking in about $30 million worldwide, but those numbers do not tell the whole story, for more than three decades later, many of us can quote lines from the film, for the 1987 script based on William Goldman’s 1973 novel was simply brilliant, and you can find t-shirts, home décor, and memes aplenty based on the movie. Just search Etsy. It is a priceless intellectual and cultural property.

The cast was star-studded, including Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, called on the revive the seemingly dead Westley, which brings us to one of those classic lines: “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

The Roman Empire was mostly dead at the start of the Common Era’s fourth century when Constantine and Licinius signed what came to be known as the Edict of Milan, granting religious freedom in the regions they controlled. This was a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, for there had been widespread persecution in the preceding years. 

In the pop-history version of the story, Constantine has a vision of a cross and becomes a Christian himself. This is late propaganda. Like all warlords and powerful men, what Constantine worshipped was Constantine, and his engagement with a growing Christianity was self-serving. Some things never change.

The Edict of Milan also marked an important turning point theologically, for while the early church had spent most of three centuries fighting over the faith, now it was in the interest of the state to resolve these battles, for they were not confined to councils and venomous epistles, but often spilled out into mob violence. So rulers became arbiters of doctrine, arbiters with troops, as partisans fought over and fabricated new ideas and beliefs, like how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be three persons and one God, of one substance, using words in ways they had never been used, or how Jesus could be both fully human and fully God at the exact same time. Among those bitter disputes was what came to be the heretical view that Christ was less than the Father and the first created thing, as well as the opposing ideas that Christ was more human than divine or more divine than human, neither being deemed acceptable.

The holy is beyond our knowing, and Hebrew scripture calls us to a theological humility, but that didn’t stop the ugly fights of that age, fights that were to the contestants a matter of eternal life or eternal damnation. 

Continue reading “Sanctification: 23 July 2023”

Romans 7:15-25

Today’s Unitarian Universalist movement in America is diverse, a mixture of individuals from different faiths and no faith, and sometimes a compromise for an interfaith marriage. Much like the United Church of Christ, members are bound together by a personal commitment to a local congregation, and in the UUA, to a core set of Seven Principles, crazy ideas like “the inherent worth and dignity of all people” and “the democratic process” in decision-making.

There are many parallels and connections. Unitarian Universalism, like the UCC, is the result of a merger between different theological traditions. The Unitarian part of their heritage is partially the result of a schism within Congregationalism, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” Historically, many New England towns had a First Parish and a First Church, one now part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the other now part of the United Church of Christ, all depending on who won in that particular town, for the church building, silver, and graveyard were at stake, not to mention souls and damnation, which were secondary to the property, of course.

We have so much in common with Unitarian Universalists, share so much in our worldview, that there are churches that belong to both denominations. This is possible mostly because folks have mellowed, and when I say folks, I mean our Puritanical Congregationalist heritage, and some of the more rabid Atheist Humanists that dominated the UUA a half century ago.

But I’d like to turn to the other half of the Unitarian Universalist heritage, and to a modern day schism of sorts.

We’ll begin in the Biblical Age, as we do. The Israelite faith did not originally include a notion of life after death. Fidelity, pleasing God, resulted in blessings in this life. Except that didn’t always happen. Sometimes bad things happened to good people, and vis-a-versa, leading the ancient theologians to one of two strategies. One was to blame the victim. If bad things are happening to you, you must not be all that good. We see this a lot in the ancient prophets. The Assyrians are invading because of injustice, or because the Northern Kingdom wasn’t worshipping properly. This primitive theology of blessings and curses in this world is at the heart of today’s Prosperity Gospel heresy, co-mingled with the heresy of Fundamentalism.

The second strategy was the growing belief that if what we might think of as karma didn’t play out in this life, then there must be a future life, where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished.

Continue reading “9 July 2023: What sort of God?”

Romans 6:12-23

When Disneyland opened in 1955, the Tomorrowland section of the park was futuristic, if a little kitsch. After all, Sputnik was still in the future, and the few computers that existed took up entire rooms. They most certainly did not fit in our pockets.

It was intended that Tomorrowland, both the California version and the later iteration in Florida, would always point to the future, would have to be updated constantly. That didn’t happen. They added things here and there, but those are iterations of the company’s intellectual properties, showcasing Buzz Lightyear or Stitch. It would not be surprising to see an “I Like Ike” button in the crowd, though prices are exponentially higher.

Maybe technology just moved too fast for them to keep ahead. Or maybe our tech-future is just too terrifying for children. Terminator 2, when the A.I. SkyNet goes to war against humankind, just doesn’t give that family fun vibe, if you know what I mean. Hasta la vista, baby.

While science fiction and futuristic classics look almost comical as the years pass, a few continue to hold their own. One of those is Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a 1992 classic novel in the genre of techno-futurism called cyberpunk. Some of the imagined technology has come to pass, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes horrifically. Fortunately, the ability of a computer virus to infect our own wetware hasn’t happened, though maybe it has, since social media has been the carrier of mass psychosis.

But it is the social commentary that seems especially prescient. In “Snow Crash,” the government has largely faded into irrelevance. Instead, our daily lives are carved up into competing corporate franchises, and gated enclaves. It is a capitalist utopia, where humans exist solely for the purpose of the bottom line, where tribe is pitted against tribe, and people spend way too much time down the rabbit hole, because the virtual is better than the physical.

This is some people’s idea of freedom, a daily “Battle Royale.” No wonder the winner-take-all video game “Fortnite” spread like wildfire. The competitive violence in the game reflects the values so many kids hear at the dinner table, or more likely, in the backseat while eating their “Happy Meals,” a zero-sum world where you can only win if someone else loses, preferably fatally.

And I am not okay with it. I don’t accept that the biggest jerk wins, Congressional elections aside.

Continue reading “2 July 2023”